You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to stitch together two or more input clips to create a longer clip in the desired output format(s). You can do this by specifying multiple inputs when creating a transcode job on Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Clips are stitched together in the order that they are specified in the job request. For each input, you can specify a Start Time and a Duration, which allows you to stitch together only the parts of each input that you want included in the output. You can leverage clip stitching to create highlight clips or add bumpers and trailers to your videos as part of the transcode process.

There is no additional cost for using this feature - you only pay for the duration of the transcoded output at the current prices for audio, SD, and HD transcoding.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Available In The Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region

Date: September 30, 2016

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert source media files into formats that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs. It manages all aspects of the media transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source media file and how you want it transcoded. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service API, AWS SDKs and the AWS Management Console.

In addition to the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, Amazon Elastic Transcoder is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

You can now monitor, alarm and receive notifications on the operational performance and usage of Amazon Elastic Transcoder using Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. Amazon Elastic Transcoder now automatically publishes nine operational metrics into Amazon CloudWatch, giving you more visibility into the overall health of your transcoding workflow and the ability to invoke an action if the metric you are tracking crosses a certain threshold for a defined period of time. You can monitor metrics such as jobs completed, jobs that errored out, output minutes generated, standby time, and errors and throttles on various API calls.

These metrics are automatically provided to all Elastic Transcoder customers at no additional costs. Alarming is billed at standard CloudWatch rates.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Available In The Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region

Date: August 9, 2016

Amazon Elastic Transcoder is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert source media files into formats that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs. It manages all aspects of the media transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source media file and how you want it transcoded. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service API, AWS SDKs and the AWS Management Console.

In addition to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region, Amazon Elastic Transcoder is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create WAV outputs with PCM audio. The WAV format primarily stores raw and uncompressed audio and is ideal for use in editing workflows and for archival. You can try out this format by using the newly available system presets.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create MPEG-DASH streams. MPEG-DASH is a standard for HTTP based adaptive bitrate streaming of video. With Elastic Transcoder support for MPEG-DASH, you can now reach a wide range of DASH-compatible devices (from desktop to mobile and OTT) with fewer output renditions created using the same easy workflows that Elastic Transcoder supports for HLS and Smooth Streaming. This enables you to simplify your video processing workflows and helps improve cost efficiency.

To produce MPEG-DASH output for your assets, generate the required video-only and audio-only outputs using the newly available system presets, and select the "MPEG-DASH" option for the playlist format when creating a transcoding job. You can then deliver the outputs by streaming them directly from S3 or through a CDN like Amazon CloudFront for low latency and high data transfer speeds.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create WebM outputs using the VP9 codec. VP9 is primarily used for web video and achieves lower bitrates without sacrificing quality. You can try out this format by using the newly available system presets.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Adds Support for Closed Captioning Standard Typically Used by Digital Television

Date: Oct 21, 2015

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to embed CEA-708 captions in the H.264 Supplemental Enhancement Information (SEI) user data in any MP4 or MPEG-TS output format. This allows you to deliver closed captions to televisions or to legacy iOS devices via HLS.

You can try this feature by choosing the “cea-708” option as the Caption Format when creating a transcoding job. For more information, see Captions in the Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide. There are no additional charges for using CEA-708 captions with your output formats.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Adds Support for XDCAM and FLAC

Date: May 20, 2015

You can now generate XDCAM-compatible video and FLAC audio using Amazon Elastic Transcoder. XDCAM is popularly used both as a mezzanine format and as a format for archival purposes in professional video production workflows. FLAC is a lossless compression format typically used as an intermediate step in an audio processing workflow. You can try out these formats by using the newly available system presets.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to apply Microsoft PlayReady DRM protection to your Smooth Streaming and HLS outputs. When you create your transcoding job, simply include the encryption key, the ID of the key on the license server, and license server URL provided by your PlayReady License Provider. Elastic Transcoder transcodes and packages your files in one simple step.

There are no additional Elastic Transcoder charges for using this new DRM packaging feature. To learn more, please consult the Securing Your Content chapter in the Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder has recently made changes to allow your jobs to run even faster. We have also made the job timing data and other useful information available to view in the job metadata. New timestamp information allows you to see how long each job spent queuing and transcoding. New fields on the job object and console display the input video resolution, duration, file size, and frame rate.

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create professional content that meets NTSC or PAL standards, package videos in an FLV or MPG container, and create animated GIF outputs. To support these new outputs, we have added additional options for color space conversions, MPEG-2 video, MP2 audio, and interlacing. Trying out these features is as easy as selecting one of the new system presets when creating a transcoding job.

You can now easily generate protected HLS streams with Amazon Elastic Transcoder and deliver them with Amazon CloudFront. With content protection for HLS, Elastic Transcoder uses encryption keys supplied by you, or generates keys on your behalf. Both methods use the AWS Key Management Service to protect the security of your keys.

You now have the option to attach up to 10 custom metadata key-value pairs to your Elastic Transcoder jobs. This metadata will be included in the job notifications and when reading the job via the API or console.

You can now exchange encrypted media files with Amazon Elastic Transcoder. This enables you to use encrypted mezzanine files as input to Amazon Elastic Transcoder, or protect your transcoded files by letting the service encrypt the output.

Details: You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to create outputs for adaptive streaming, compatible with version 4 of the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. This expands on version 3 capabilities by adding support for byte-range requests, late-binding audio, and I-frame only playback.

Details: Amazon Elastic Transcoder now includes Captioning Support for video content. Captioning is the process of displaying text that accompanies the video to transcribe the audio portion of the program or translate the audio into a different language. Starting today you can now use Elastic Transcoder to add, remove, or preserve captions as you transcode your video from one format to another.

Details: Amazon Web Services is excited to announce the beta release of Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a new AWS service that makes it easy to convert video between different digital media formats in the cloud.